When citizen Mike DeLay traveled back to his childhood home of Reedley, California to explain to the region’s farmers how his central coast community had been gravely sickened by the aerial spraying of Checkmate in 2007, his audience listened with visible discomfort. DeLay was not the first emissary sent to them to talk about the light brown apple moth - the California Department of Food and Agriculture had already been there.

Spewing their infamous misinformation regarding the ‘voracious moth’, CDFA managed to so frighten the growers with threats of mass agricultural destruction and costly quarantines that the City of Reedley adopted the first and only resolution in support of spraying deadly chemicals on the families of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties and the densely populated SF Bay Area.

Mind you, this toxic, enforced spraying will not be happening over the homes of Reedley farmers and their children. They will not be inhaling carcinogens, mutagens, endocrine disrupting chemicals, crime-inducing synthetic moth pheromones and deadly PM10 pollution. But millions of their customers all along the California coast will, and in the end, City of Reedley growers have decided that’s preferable to potential financial penalties due to the presence of the LBAM in the state.

Bottom line: their income is more important than their customers’ lives.

Reedley is known as the World’s Fruit Basket. The region’s economy depends on delivering a variety of fruits to the national and international market. When faced with CDFA’s strong-arm threats of quarantine, the city made a moral choice: spray humans so growers won’t be penalized. Unfortunately, the City of Reedley made their decision before hearing from Mike DeLay. Unfortunately, Reedley’s growers have been victimized. Unfortunately, they have been duped.

When you read the text of the resolution (see page 69 of the document), it becomes abundantly clear that Reedley’s growers have been lied to and basically blackmailed by the CDFA. The resolution hinges on the following pieces of tragic misinformation:

1) That LBAM could cause billions of dollars in damage.

In fact, even CDFA admits that LBAM has done no damage and California’s most respected UC scientists predict it never will do any damage here. Further, it is important to note that the LBAM is unlikely to make it to the Central Valley as it lives in cool moist habitats like the coast - not hot, dry habitats like the City of Reedley and surrounding growing regions.

2) That LBAM is an eradicable pest

In fact, specialists in invasion biology have repeatedly tried to explain to CDFA that the harmless moth is simply too widespread to be eradicated. As is the case with most of CDFA’s scores of ‘eradication’ programs, extinction of the moth here is unlikely to result even after years of spraying. The track record of the CDFA is all you need to see to determine that they have failed in the majority of their so-called ‘eradication’ attempts over the past several decades.

3) That Checkmate, the spray product, is less harmful than other pesticides

In fact, Checkmate has, to date, caused both acute and chronic illness in Central Coast families, nearly killed a formerly-healthy infant, killed hundreds of birds, killed cats, dogs, rabbits, fish and honey bees. Checkmate causes illness and death.

4) That OEHHA determined that the illnesses and death which ensued after the 2007 spraying were not connected to the spraying

In fact, OEHHA admitted that they were unable to determine whether or not the spraying caused the documented illnesses and death. It is unsurprising that OEHHA was unable to state for certain that the biochemical spray sickened and killed people and animals - rather than investigating the reports by contacting the victims and their physicians, OEHHA threw 90% of the claims out and refused to contact a single person on the Central Coast. Little wonder they were unable to put a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the connection between spraying people with pesticide and pesticide-induced illnesses which match, point for point, the ingredients in Checkmate.

Familiar Language
If the points in the above resolution sound eerily familiar to you regarding a moth that devastates agriculture and a pesticide that is perfectly safe to spray on human beings, it is because you have encountered the exact language in the Reedley resolution in the mouth of Ag. Secretary A.G. Kawamura. I don’t think it would be wrong to question whether the City of Reedley resolution was, in fact, authored by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. CDFA held a secret, closed-door meeting at the City of Reedley Community Center on May 14th, 2008. The evidence of the lies told there to farmers may be found in the text of the resolution which passed a few days later.

One can only wonder how the victimized farmers felt when, the very next day, Mike DeLay showed up on their doorstep with concrete information indicating that growers had just been fooled by the CDFA machine in a brand new effort to pit farmers against their customers. Nobody likes to be duped.

“Some were troubled and most did not want to believe what I was saying,” said Mike DeLay of his meeting with the growers. “I believe it created a moral problem for them and they did not want to be put in that position. I believe the farmers are, for the most part, very morally minded and good people. I was asked by one grower just before the meeting ended, demanding an answer of what I would do if in their shoes? It was clear to me that he was upset and was struggling for the right thing to do but was afraid of losing his farm. I told them that knowing what I know about LBAM, I believe the central valley does not have any risk of LBAM as it can not survive there due to hot climate and I would never support aerial spraying anywhere, ever.”

It can’t have been pleasant to listen to the mild-mannered, obviously truthful DeLay explain how he and his wife were horrifically sickened by Checkmate, how many of their friends and neighbors are still terribly sick half a year later, how baby Jack Wilcox is now being kept breathing by means of corticosteroids after his lungs were damaged by the enforced spray. It can’t have been pleasant to stand behind a resolution, passed 24 hours earlier, that asserts that growers will protect agriculture at the cost of human lives.

What the City of Reedley Has Done
It’s imperative to state first that the 7 million people of coastal California who are set to be sprayed with deadly and secret chemicals in 2008 actually understand what happened in Reedley. Kawamura and his colleagues have been here, too, trying to scare us into believing that the light brown apple moth would eat just about every green thing in the state. We know how convincing these agents are. We know how skillfully they twist statements about harm and safety. We understand what happened in the City of Reedley.

But now it’s time for the Reedley growers to extend that same courtesy back to us. Please understand, we are your customers. You have just passed a resolution that says your apples and oranges are more important than our children’s lives. We have supported you with our dollar, but we aren’t going to support farmers who ally themselves with criminals. CDFA has now been convicted twice of breaking the law by creating their false LBAM ‘emergency’. They have been found guilty of violating CEQA. These are not honest or law-abiding citizens. They are deceitful law-breakers. And Reedley farmers have just linked arms with them. You are standing in the company of California’s very worst public and environmental offenders.

We can’t support that.

We implore Reedley’s farmers to withdraw their resolution, now that actual facts have been put into their hands about the harmlessness of this negligible bug and the very real threat to life posed by the aerial spraying of Checkmate over urban areas. Baby Jack Wilcox’s life is more important than your fruit, isn’t it? What do you think will happen to this 1 year old boy if CDFA sprays him again? Do you really support this happening?

And, if humanitarian concerns have somehow ceased to rule the actions of the farmers of the City of Reedly, then they must at least consider these 2 outcomes.

1) Support spraying us, and we will be forced to boycott you. We are not going to give money to people who pass resolutions that support the biochemcial killing of our children, spouses, parents and neighbors.

2) Support spraying us, and we will sicken and die. You cannot sell fruit to dead people. Killing off your customer base is not a viable marketing strategy.

What the City of Reedley has done is to pass the one and only resolution in the state that applauds the violation of the Constitutional tenets which defend residents from human experimentation without consent. Some 25 cities in the spray zone have now passed resolutions adamantly opposing the poisoning of millions of Californians, their pets, wildlife, food, air and watershed. What the City of Reedley has done is to fall victim to the fear-mongering tactics of CDFA, buying into the deceptive mirage of California devastated by a negligible leafroller moth. What the City of Reedley has done, sadly, is to play right into the dirty hands of A.G. Kawamura, allowing themselves to be bullied and pitted against their very own customers.

Justice here would be the farmers storming the offices of CDFA, demanding at the tops of their lungs to know why they were tricked, demanding to see the science which ‘proves’ that their crops are under threat, demanding to know why CDFA thinks growers can be used as pawns and played for fools.

Reedley farmers lacked information until Mike DeLay came to town. Now they have it. And now, customers are waiting to see if they will rewrite their resolution in order to protect our health and rights, or if we will be forced to enact a boycott of the City of Reedley’s growers. Support us and we will support you. We have a common opponent in the odious CDFA.

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